“Good point; I have no idea. Do you?”
“Sorry, but I don’t know either...”
Luina was stuck as well. Anima had figured that running an orphanage would have prepared her for situations like these, but it was likely that her parents had furnished the place before she’d taken it over.
“It’s okay; I’ll show you where it is,” Myuke said.
“Way to go, Myuke! You’re like a walking map, m’kay?!”
“Myukey ’mazing!”
“Aw, jeez. It’s nothing.”
She tried to play it off, but her flushed cheeks betrayed her.
“I don’t know what we’d do without you, Myuke.”
“You always come through when we need you the most.”
“S-Seriously, you guys...”
Myuke went bright red as they kept piling on the praise, then started guiding them through the town with a big smile on her face.
“It’s right there.”
The baby supplies store was right behind the tailor’s. While they didn’t visit the area very often, they were sure to have walked past the place a handful of times. Anima had definitely passed by when he was hunting for Marie’s birthday present and ran into the lost Ena. He had escorted her to the toy store, which happened to be right next to the baby supplies store.
Following Myuke’s lead, they entered the store. Anima was immediately taken aback by the sheer quantity of goods he had never seen at any point in his life.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a baby blanket,” Luina responded. “You wrap the baby up in it.”
“So it’s baby clothes?”
“No, it’s for keeping them warm. It also helps keep their head upright when they can’t hold it up themselves.”
“You’re surprisingly knowledgeable about all this.”
“My parents told me about most of it years ago, and there were even times when I would change Marie’s diapers.”
“That’s reassuring. All right, what about this?”
“That’s a cloth diaper. You need to keep babies clean, so you have to change it every time it gets dirty. I remember we’d have to change Marie’s fifteen times a day sometimes!”
“They get dirty that quickly? In that case, we’ll need at least thirty, assuming we can wash them every day. Maybe we should buy forty instead—that way we’re covered for rainy days too.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I’ll count out forty of ’em, m’kay?!” Bram offered.
“I’ll count bibs!” Myuke jumped in to help, using her knowledge from the time Marie was still little. “We need a bunch of those too, right?”
“That would be great. Could you count out thirty, please?”
Anima and Luina left the two of them to get them the necessary number of diapers and bibs, and started walking through the store until Anima finally found something he was familiar with.
“These are clothes, right?”
“Yes, they are. Some can be opened at the front, which makes changing the baby much easier, so I think we should get those. Seven should be enough to start.”
“Seven of those, a baby stroller... ah, and perhaps a rattle to calm them down when they start crying?”
“Hmm... Sure, I don’t see why not. It never hurts to have one.”
Anima set off in search of a rattle, pulling a baby stroller he’d found behind him. By the time he found one, Myuke and Bram had finished their quests of gathering the necessary supplies.
“Well done, girls. It must’ve been difficult to count out so many.”
“It was a walk in the park!”
“I can’t wait to learn how to change a diaper, m’kay?!”
“Me too. I think we’re ready to pay and go get waffles. Do we need anything else?”
“Nope,” Luina answered, “we’re all set.”
“Yummy waffles, m’kay?!”
Seeing the excitement in his daughters’ eyes made his heart dance, but it quickly tensed up with shock as he came to a grave realization.
“Where’s Marie?”
Marie hadn’t answered the call for waffles, and that definitely wasn’t normal. When he thought more about it, he noticed that he hadn’t heard her voice at all since they’d entered the shop. The girls also caught on and immediately began scouring the building.
“Marie! Where are you?!”
“We’re going to get some waffles, m’kay?!”
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
No matter how much they looked, Marie wouldn’t come out, which only meant one thing: she wasn’t there.
“It’s my fault...”
Anima felt like a failure for not having caught on sooner.
“Don’t blame yourself. I didn’t notice that she was gone either...”
“No, it’s definitely my fault. She didn’t like that I made us wait to get waffles, so she ran off...”
“She would have run away from home countless times already if that were all it took. We don’t know why she disappeared, okay? The most important thing right now is finding her.”
She calmed Anima down with a gentle tone.
“You’re right.” Luina was just as anxious as Anima, and it was his duty to calm her down, not the other way around. Letting her get worked up probably wasn’t good for the baby. “I’ll go look around; you stay here.”
“I’ll go too, m’kay?”
“Okay. Bram, you’re with me. Myuke, you stay here with Luina, okay? It’ll be all right; we’ll find her.”
“Good luck, Anima.”
“Please don’t get mad at her when you find her. She isn’t doing this to upset anyone. There must be a reason she ran off.”
“I know. I won’t get mad.”
With that, Anima and Bram left the store. They glanced around the area, but couldn’t see her anywhere.
“I wanna use the Jade Dragon stone, m’kay?”
“Why?”
“’Cause it stands out, m’kay? Marie’ll totally notice the ruckus outside, and finding a huge dragon in the middle of the street isn’t exactly a hard thing to do.”
“Oh, I see. That’s not a bad idea, but we shouldn’t go that far unless we absolutely have to. The whole town is enjoying their day outside, doing some shopping. We can’t terrorize them all just to find Marie.”
The dragon costume had been popular during the Costume Festival, but a real dragon appearing out of nowhere was an entirely different thing. People would be terrified of her, and Anima knew the repercussions of being viewed as a monster better than anyone else. He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy, let alone one of his beloved daughters.
“I can get on the roof and look, m’kay?”
“It would be easier to scan the area from the rooftops, but I don’t want you to slide off and hurt yourself.” He could have gone up there himself, but that didn’t eliminate the danger. Another option was for them to split up, but he wasn’t a fan of that idea either. Were Bram to disappear from his sight while looking for Marie, any remaining doubts about him being a failure as a father would be gone. “Marie couldn’t have gone far. Let’s try calling her name for now.”
“I agree, m’kay?”
Anima and Bram each took a deep breath and screamed at the top of their lungs.
“Marie! Where are you?!”
“We’re going for waffles, m’kay?!”
There was no answer, but they both came to the same sudden conclusion.
“Maybe she went to get waffles.”
“Exactly! Let’s go to the plaza, m’kay?!”
Hand in hand, they rushed to the plaza, but there was no sign of Marie. Anima was starting to get extremely worried. Where could she have possibly gone?
“Amima!”
Ena was jogging up to them with a big smile on her face and a waffle in her hands.
“Hello, Anima. Are you out with your girls?”
Camilla followed shortly behind her, though her husband wasn’t with them. Perhaps it was his birthday, and they’d gone out to buy him a present.
“Have you seen Marie?”
“Marie? No, I haven’t...”
“Oh...”
“Did she run off somewhere?” Camilla asked in a worried tone.
Ena had disappeared on her in much the same fashion just a couple months earlier, so she understood how Anima felt. However, upon thinking about that incident, he came up with another idea.
Ah, right.
He remembered the concept he’d used to find where Camilla had been waiting. Upon finding Ena, his first instinct was to check her absolute favorite place in town. That was the logic by which he was able to reunite the two at the toy store—which just so happened to be right next to the baby supplies store.
“Yeah, m’kay?! Marie just—”
“Let’s go, Bram.”
“Huh? Tell me what’s going on, m’kay? Where are we going?”
“To Marie.”
“You know where she is?! M’kay!”
“Yes! I know exactly where she is!”
Anima took Bram’s hand and they rushed into the toy store. Just like he’d thought, she was right there, rifling through toys with a serious look on her face.